Registration Usability – 87 Registration Forms Tested

Following up on previous posts about permission marketing and welcome emails for ecommerce websites, I’d like to share my personal experience registering for 87 accounts with the top online retailers and offer some tips for registration form design.

Your site may have several forms that ask for personal information – for email subscriptions, creating an account, entering billing information, requesting help, general contact, creating a wishlist or order tracking. It’s important to note that in my test I was taking initiative to sign up for an account by clicking “Register” or “My Account”. I did not reach these forms in the middle of a checkout process (required registration).

Popular Form Fields and Frequency

1. Password – 100%

Obviously this is a requirement for all sites, but 100% required users to invent their own passwords rather than sending computer-generated temporary passwords (which are terribly annoying). But Dell and Nieman Marcus failed to mention clearly that their passwords require at least one number until you fail at your first password attempt.

2. Repeat Password Field – 89%

Though it takes a small amount of extra time, this is recommended because it’s easy to make errors when you only see **** as you type. How frustrating for customers when they cannot log in because the password they *thought* they entered is wrong.

Unless you are not asking for a mailing address at the same time (for billing and shipping information), don’t require first and last names, because customers will have to re-enter this at a later time.

5. Required Address – 33%

I really don’t want to argue that for the sake of a short form, retailers shouldn’t require an address. Because billing and shipping information is essential to ecommerce, there is reason for having this information in the form, but I recommend making it optional (see below). 7% of retailers just asked for postal code – perhaps to notify registrants if they fall outside of the shipping area, or to collect demographic information. “Birds of a feather flock together” and your postal code tells a lot about your income.

eBags asks for postal code “for information on events in your area” in an “optional” section – but uses an asterisk. Why?

6. Confirm Email Address – 32%

This is recommended as it’s easy to mistype an email address. Incorrect email addresses create log-in problems and makes it impossible to send confirmation emails and other messages.

7. Security Question – 20%

As an alternative to sending you your login details via email for handy reference, some sites employ a security question feature — either by dropdown menu question or an open-ended “hint” field.

Although some retailers get really creative with their benefits pages, I prefer bullet point lists – makes it easier to scan.

9. Username – 13%

Email addresses make fine user names — they’re easy to remember and unique. Because you need to have a user email addresses anyway, save them the trouble of trying 15 times to find a username that’s available, or having to remember their preferred handle appended with a bunch of numbers. Playing the username creation game is frustrating as it forces the user to re-enter password information every attempt.

10. Non-Canadian Friendly – 13%

There are at least two ways you can prevent Canadians (or other citizens of the world) from doing business with you. You can make your postal code field only 5 digits long, or you can include a dropdown menu of just US states.

11. Required Birthday – 7%

A few reasons you might ask this:

1. To segment your list 2. To verify the registrant is at least 13 years old 3. Customer relationship building – Macy’s includes a line: “In the future, we will use this information to send you something special”

12. Terms and Conditions – 6%

I noticed this is not very common among retail websites, though very common on other types of site registration. I’m interested to know what percent actually read these statements! 3% of sites used an “I am 13 years or older” checkbox.

Disney communicates well that this information will be used to provide a more personalized shopping experience.

14. Captcha – 1%

Only 1-800-Contacts used a Captcha to make sure you’re human.

Note: iBuyDigital and Office Max required credit card information up front and were excluded from the study for this reason.

What’s The Ideal Registration Form Length?

Usability experts recommend keeping forms as simple as possible because the longer your form is, the lower your completion rate. Don’t ask for too much information. I see there being 4 reasons for this:

Trust– The amount of information I give you correlates with how much I trust you to use this information responsibly, and that giving you this information somehow will benefit me. If I am signing up to create a wish list, I am not ready to enter my credit card information.

Time– If a form looks overly complicated, I might not be that motivated to fill it all out if there is a shorter alternative (competitor I have done business with or have recently visited)

Typos– The more fields to fill out, the more chance for error – especially with captchas and password fields, causing user frustration and abandonment

However, if address and billing information will inevitably be required to process payment and ship goods, it also makes sense to collect this information in one go. You definitely don’t want to double up on information in all your different forms. What’s the solution?

Give users the option of filling in what they are willing to share with you

Clearly state the benefits of providing this information now (i.e. this will make your check-out process so much faster)

Distinguish required fields from optional fields with the conventional *

I like Macy’s form for a few reasons:

Uses * to indicate required fields

States short and sweet benefits to creating an account

Birthday and gender are optional, but there is an incentive to enter birthday

The postal code input field is long enough to accommodate 6 and 7 digit entries

Customers have the option to also “Add My Card”

However, the faint “Add My Card” button is easily overlooked this way, and would be easier noticed if the fields were included on the form, only made optional. 1-800-Flowers’ makes the option of adding additional personal information (this could easily be a billing section too) hard to miss and provides a rationale for adding it to boot. But without using asterisks to differentiate required from non-required fields, many people will assume it’s a requirement.

Another option is to make the registration process very fast and simple, and take customers to an overview page where additional information can be added at any time, like Land’s End:

Lovely. The one beef I have with this design is the right hand sidebar looks too much like Google Adsense and may be ignored entirely.

The most annoying required section was Foot Locker’s survey. This is great for the marketing department, but if requiring this information is not bad enough, using the word “survey” communicates the customer is offering Foot Locker free market research. Customers need to see how any additional personal information is going to ultimately benefit them, not you.

About Elastic Path Software

This blog is brought to you by Elastic Path Software, a provider of digital commerce technology and expertise to enterprises selling digital goods and content such as Google, Time Inc, and Virgin Media. With more than 14,000 subscribers, it is the #1 ranked ecommerce blog by PostRank Analytics, #35 on AdAge's Power150, and a SEMMY 2009 and 2010 winner in the online marketing and general category.

The opinions expressed here are of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Elastic Path.